Mathematical perceptions and feelings of space, Marseille 10-11 October

There will be a 2-day interdisciplinary workshop in Marseille, on mathematics and art, which may be of interest to geometers. The announcement is below.

Mathematical perceptions and feelings of space
Marseille, 10-11th of October.

The notion of space is a broad and complex one, in mathematics alone the word is used in many different ways. It can be regarded as one of the central motivating concepts, for the subject, as Poincáre said mathematicians “must aid the philosopher to fathom the notions of number, of space, of time.” Too often mathematical ideas about space and the different ways it can be perceived are buried under the algebraic notations that gain control of the ideas. Yet the mathematical approach, in large part because of this control, is able to distinguish many different flavours of what we might consider “space”.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together mathematicians of various disciplines with artists and scientists to explore the different ways we feel and understand space, in two directions : how the mathematical understanding allows us to express precisely many different common intuitions about space (continuity, discreteness, dimension, tangent line, shape, distance…), and also how logical exploration of mathematical concepts allows us to experiment with new intuitions never seen or felt before, for example, hyperbolic spaces, tiling spaces, Lie Groups, fractals, Cantor sets, Peano curves, devil staircases, p-adic numbers…

Address

Getting here

The department of mathematics is in building NO, on the Campus de la Plaine, of the Université libre de Bruxelles. The geometry group is on the 7th floor. This map shows NO, as well as the metro station Delta and the stop for the number 71 bus. The number 95 also stops a short walk from the department. See the STIB website for more information on public transport in Brussels.